[ntp:questions] Re: Latest changes to TWikiGettingStarted

Hal Murray hmurray at suespammers.org
Mon Oct 6 06:02:38 UTC 2003


>	Correct.  At the extreme, those operating in certain types of 
>environments may have no choice but to have only printed 
>documentation available to them.

If you are working from paper, I don't think it makes much difference
if you start from raw ascii, HTML, or PDF.  (That is, I'm willing to
assume most people can get access to a browser and Acrobat.  I admit
that Acrobat may be difficult for some people.  Ghostscript fills
part of that gap.)

That's my personal opinion/experience.  There may be a significant
number of people without access to a web browser or Acrobat, or printer.


There is a line of reasoning that says that the people doing the work
get to pick the tools they want to use.  The flip side is that for
documentation, the value of the work is scaled by how many people
can use it and/or how hard they have to work to find the information
they are looking for.

Another thing to keep in mind is google and grep.  goolge is smart
enough to look inside pdf files.  grep doesn't do that as well.
(Occasionally, when I get stumped on something, I'll grep the whole
directory extracted from a tarball.  That's probably not important for
getting started.)

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